Despite objections, Air Force sees no good alternatives to eliminating aircraft fleets

Jared Serbu reports.

The Air Force's top officer said Congress needs to let his service retire entire
fleets of aircraft in order to cope with budget cuts.

Gen. Mark Welsh said if the
money has to come from somewhere else, each of the alternatives would jeopardize
the Air Force's core mission areas.

Welsh, speaking to a breakfast audience at the National Press Club in Washington
Wednesday, said even with the partial relief from sequestration DoD got from last
year's Bipartisan Budget Act, the Air Force still needs to find ways to trim its
budget by billions of dollars.

The service said it is shrinking its
end strength as quickly as it can as one means to save money, but Welsh argued
the only way to find savings of the magnitude the Air Force needs is to divest
itself of entire aircraft platforms.

"The reason this seems so dramatic to people is that three years ago, the
projected budget for fiscal year '15 for the Air Force was $20 billion higher than
we actually have in our budget. That's about 20 percent of our overall budget," he
said. "Changing from a plan that had projected funding and training and force
structure at that level to one that is going to be $20 billion a year lower from
here forward is a significant adjustment. But if it's not done, things will just
get worse in the future. Trimming around the edges as we put together our budget
proposal just wasn't going to work. We had to look at some pretty dramatic
things."

Among them, the retirement of the service's entire fleets of A-10 attack jets and
U-2 spy planes. The Air Force says slimming down the size of its aircraft
inventory across the board wouldn't produce the savings it needs, because
eliminating fleets outright also cuts out the huge logistics and maintenance
infrastructure that accompanies each aircraft type.

All horrible options

The A-10 decision has invited fierce opposition from members of Congress, particularly ones whose
districts include A-10 bases. But Welsh said the move to retire all 343 of those
planes will save the service $4.2 billion per year, and there aren't many other
ways to save that kind of money.

"We also looked at saving $4.2 billion by cutting F-16s out of the fleet. It would
take about 363 F-16s to do that, which is 14 squadrons of F-16s. We could cut the
F-15E fleet. We could cut the entire B-1 fleet. We could push F-35s outside the
future years' Defense plan and buy them later, which drives costs in lots of other
areas, by the way, but we could do that," he said. "And we could just ground a
whole bunch of squadrons today and make it look like last year did on our flight
lines, with airplanes parked and nobody flying. We looked at all those options,
and we came very clearly to the conclusion that of all those horrible options. The
least operationally impactful was to divest the A-10 fleet. It makes eminent sense
from a military perspective if you have to make these kinds of cuts, but nobody
likes it."

In the run-up to the 2015 budget submission, the service scoured all five of its
core mission areas for things it could do without, or with less of. In each case,
officials concluded they could not cut any deeper without crippling core missions
like maintaining air superiority, but Welsh said those are exactly the cuts that
would have to be made if Congress blocks the A-10 stand-down.

"Air superiority is foundational to the way we fight wars as an American
military," he said. "Without it, you can't maneuver on the ground, you can't
maneuver at sea. You have to have it, and all of our warfighters know that. And
only one service can provide a theater's worth of air superiority. Only one has
the capacity, the command-and-control capability to be able to do this. When we
capped the buy of F-22s, it meant that we had to support them with some other kind
of airplane to provide a theater's worth of air superiority. And for the near
term, Until the F-35 is on board and able to assist, it is the F-15C. We are
cutting F-15s out of our fleet this year as part of the budget cuts, but we can't
eliminate the entire fleet of aircraft, or else we can't do the air superiority
mission, and our combatant commanders won't accept that."